10 Albums That Would Make Great Films

10 Albums That Would Make Great Films

A while back, we looked at albums that’d make for great TV series, a topic that gave rise to much intra-office discussion and several as-yet-unfulfilled promises to actually sit down and write some serious pitches. Anyway, the release of David Lynch’s Crazy Clown Time has got us thinking about the logical follow-up to this idea — albums that’d make for great films! There are plenty of records that spring to mind, several of which could happily be shot by a certain Mr. Lynch himself. Here are the ten albums that we’d love to option the rights to — so if you’re a mega-rich producer, at least give us credit when you cash in on these, eh?

For some reason, we’ve been listening to a lot of early/mid-period Blur of late, and particularly this album. Revisiting The Great Escape many years after the Great NME-Hyped Chart Battle of 1995, two things stand out about the album: a) how musically weird it is (especially Graeme Coxon’s guitar solos — see “Country House” and “Stereotypes” for examples) and b) how dark and misanthropic it is. Like all of Blur’s early work, the album’s populated by a rich cast of characters from a cross-section of English society, from the grotesque wife-swapping duo of “Stereotypes” and the charmless man of, um, “Charmless Man” to the forlorn taxi driver of “Best Days” and the star-crossed lovers of “Yuko and Hiro.” We’d love to see someone build a narrative around these characters and the theme of escape that dominates the album — we reckon the result’d be something like a modern take on The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.